On their lunch break, two brothers sat across from me, behind them a large black-and-gold sign in the shape of Morocco’s five-pointed star, embedded within it is their company’s name: Morocco Grillz.
Yassine Mondir, the younger brother, is the mastermind. He’s a dental prosthetic specialist and occasional rapper who sat to the left. On the right, Youness Mondri, the oldest, led the conversation. Their dynamic is clear: one is the architect, and the other, by his own admission, “is just the helping hand.”
That day, Youness helped translate Moroccan Darija spoken by his younger brother, but his role goes far beyond interpretation. Together, the two run their grills-making company: Morocco Grillz, a five-room laboratory in Casablanca, dedicated entirely to metal teeth.
Their team now counts over ten employees, most of them women, quietly reshaping a male-dominated industry.
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Although Yassine is the one with the technical recipe, having realized through his dental studies that grills-making was essentially an extension of his profession, his older brother was ultimately the undeniable influence.
“He was still a baby when I was listening to hip hop, so he literally grew up with it,” Youness tells me, referring to Yassine.
“We were both born in Germany, and I remember I was six or seven years old when I first got into hip-hop, and it just never stopped. When we came to Morocco as toddlers, CDs were not the main thing, and unlike today, this sound was rare, so we were always searching for hip-hop.”
Yassine interrupted to recall the many times he would take the foil from chocolate wrappers to press against his teeth, improvising his own grills and imitating the clips of Nelly that the two were watching at the time.
That early tinfoil experimentation would eventually lead to something far bigger: the first grills business in Africa and the Arab world. Their work bedazzles the teeth of rappers, producers, and singers like ElGrande Toto, Lil Tchubi, Manal Benchlikha, and Ramoon.
“We started this in 2013, and it felt like a logical conclusion,” Youness said. “I was making instrumentals, and Yassine was already rapping before he even got his dental diploma. Hip hop came first, not dental work. But once he became a professional dental prosthetist, and given that we’d been part of the local hip hop scene forever, it just became a marriage of passions.”
He continued: “But it really started from nothing. Yassine tried a lot of things; he learned the technique for professional dental usage, but had to experiment a lot when it came to grills. Remember, there were no tutorials back then. Now, we use 3D printing and 3D modeling, but early on, we were working with wax and very minimal tools. Well, Yassine was. I did nothing,” Both laughed.
Yassine doesn’t like to take all of the credit, so he shifted the conversation back to his older brother’s impact, being also the one responsible for digital rendering today, explaining that their deep roots in the scene helped launch the brand.
“We brought in our friends, mainly rappers who were already known locally. I mean, ElGrande Toto barely had five thousand views when we made him his first pair of grills,” he said. “Many times, we made them for free.”
Back then, grills were not part of the hip-hop language in Morocco, nor the region, frankly, so although the two were following the steps of their hip-hop heroes, they were introducing a new concept to the region, carefully.
Any time one of the brothers would mention their title as “first”, as first grills makers or the first to incorporate Arabic letters into their craft, the other half would jokingly follow up, interchangeably grounding one another.
“It was hard at the beginning to convince people of the culture. They didn’t even know the name of it [grills]. So you had to explain why it was used, what the story behind it is, and why it’s considered jewelry. Even rappers didn’t know.” says Yassine.
“There was no Netflix special about hip hop back then; now they know better. But when we started, it was a lot of convincing, especially when it came to the price and the cost of shipping. Transport was a huge issue for us; we don’t have the infrastructure. I mean, it was easier to send to Europe than it was to send through the MENA region.”
In their early days, Morocco Grillz were constantly trying to justify the price of their metals, explaining that it is jewelry, not prosthetics. “You have to know that in Africa, most people can’t buy gold or silver. They don’t have the means. So we had to come up with alternatives, mainly biomedical metals that looked like gold or that looked like silver. When polished, you can’t tell the difference. The same goes for diamonds. It all depends on a person’s budget.”
Youness continues: “In Africa, jewelry doesn’t define social status per se, not as much as in Europe or the US. Here, it more so signals being part of the hip-hop scene and being stylish. It’s more about the object itself and the art behind it than it is about its value.” This is where Yassin interjects to mention the interview with Lil Wayne when he said, “If I ever go broke, I just have to sell my grills.”
The more we spoke, the more it became evident that I am speaking to two hip-hop heads. Throughout the conversation, they both would reference musicians, interviews, and deep cuts that are known only to those within the culture.
It became understandable why to them and their customers, the idea of grills is not just a quick flaunt, but a precious piece of jewelry working in slow magic and surrounded by all the love in the world.
“Most hip-hop artists in Morocco trusted us because they knew we were not doing it just as a money grab. It’s really just as simple as ‘oh, you have a music video to shoot, let us think of something together.’ It’s for the love of the game, and these are our true friends. We still meet outside of the lab just to have fun and joke around as normal friends would,” says Youness.
But the friends are not the only inspiration, it’s the Moroccan culture in of itself. Whether it’s Moroccan ceramics, the Arabic language, or Amazigh symbols, Morocco Grillz acts like its name: Moroccan.
Yassine notes: “We are open-minded people with well-travelled families, and we like to move around and mix up cultures, but when we design things, we mainly take inspiration from our local culture. We hope to open subsidiaries in Africa and the MENA region. Why not open a shop in Egypt or Ghana or Palestine, or South Africa? We would love to expand into these regions. We believe we can understand them better than anyone else, and that we will be able to adapt to their local fashion.”
There is truth to that. In fact, who better to dress your teeth than those who speak your language?
Pop Culture Editor-At-Large at Complex MENA.
